Celebrating the world’s foremost photo app on its fifth anniversary
It lets you automatically save all photos on your Smartphone, including ones you clicked or received on messaging apps.
It suggests rotating pictures that seem wrongly oriented.
It asks you frequently whether you want to archive pictures that it thinks you don’t need in your main album.
It prepares a trip album for you including a photo of a map of places you visited that it created for you.
Daily, it reminds you of pictures you clicked a year ago, a few years ago and even decades ago (if the photos have the date stamp on them).
It makes short videos from all pictures you took on a day or at an event.
It lets you search for photographs by name, description or tags you have used to label your pictures.
It lets you edit photos and make them look better.
It lets you create albums from photos contributed by multiple people.
It lets you share all your pictures with persons of your choice.
Can you guess which is the app referred above? This app sounds like a “photo nanny” who does all that you can wish with pictures on your Smartphone. If you most use your phone for images, then there is one app that is very handy to manage the images with ease.
It is Google Photos, a picture storage app that Google launched in May 2015. In just five years, Google Photos now has more than one billion users and is likely the default storage destination for most pictures clicked on Smartphones in the world today.
Google Photos has received critical acclaim from reviewers all through its life and in its sixth year is destined to draw even more users to its amazing features.
Here are some admirable features of Google Photos:
Unlimited storage: In a first for any app, Google Photos allows users to upload any number of pictures free of cost for all images that are high resolution or 16MP. The limit for storage of videos is 1080p under unlimited storage. Under high-quality image storage, pictures sizes should be less than 16 MP and videos less than 1080p. Users are allowed to upgrade to storing original images by linking their photos to their G-drive account to enhance for paid storage.
Sharing with ease: Users can create albums of pictures and share the link to the collections with others by any messaging mode. The recipients with the link to the albums can view the photographs without having to download Google Photos. Viewers with Google Accounts can also leave feedback and comments about pictures.
Shared albums can be created for multiple users to add pictures. You can add photos shared by others to your own Google Photos storage with one click.
In the partner account feature, you are allowed to share all their photos with other users.
Creativity with ease: Collage feature allows a choice of two to nine photos for inclusion in one image. You can make videos with the ten available templates or have an animation of chosen photos with an upper limit of fifty pictures.
Suggestions: Google Photos keeps suggesting editing of pictures, creation of albums and enhancement of photos. I have found the blue-sky feature is one that transforms images with the sky in them. The altered picture with a change in colour of sky looks dramatically different from the original.
Search: You can search all photos in your albums for a person, a location, or an object. Matching of photos is easier when the images have location data.
Also, users have the option to update details of pictures, and Google Photos uses such data to locate images. The app allows search of People, Place and Things for which the app has the excellent capability.
Search results on Google Photos can be very efficient.
The app reads even text used in pictures, and the object searched appearing in results. For example, if you search for ‘cake’ in your album, all photos with cakes will show up. But any photo with the word ‘cake’ write in it will also be part of the search results.
Ability to search precisely is my favourite feature on Google Photos.
Google Photos is a beautiful example of machine learning and algorithms that simplify complex tasks without users getting a whiff of the underlying technology.
A friend was telling me recently she was spooked to know that her pictures as a child were identified by Google Photos even when she had not tagged herself in her childhood photos. I told my friend that the app’s algorithm was very efficient for the identification of facial patterns and to match them as that of the same person at vastly different ages.
As a writer, I have found Google Photos a great aid in my hobby. I frequently use the app to create collages of pictures for articles when I prefer one representative image to anchor the content. In a few clicks, I can search for images that are appropriate and then combined chosen pictures as one.
My Google Photos album has pictures from the past twenty years. The app has chronologically listed all digital photos with date stamps for efficient access.
If you have not used Google Photos, the app’s fifth anniversary is a great time to choose it. The hundreds, if not thousands of pictures that you click on your Smartphone, are best managed through a phone-based app.
Google Photos is an all-in-one solution that combines storage, indexing, editing, archiving, sharing and anything else you may choose to do with your digital pictures. It seems quaint now to think of a time when we managed our photos without a digital photo-nanny like Google Photos.
If pictures are the most used feature of Smartphones, then for millions of users, Google Photos is an app that they use daily and multiple times.
